Camille Paglia Discusses Transgender Issues

I've followed Camille Paglia for many year, always finding her opinions deeply explored, courageous and clearly stated. An excerpt from CPYU:

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a “woman” or a “man” simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.

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University of Missouri School of Journalism Embraces Censorship.

University of Missouri School of Journalism has announced that it is engaging in censorship based on comically vague criteria. Excerpt from City Journal:

One of the top journalism schools in the country endorses restrictions on free speech. The University of Missouri’s School of Journalism currently enforces a sweeping newsroom diversity policy that aims to eradicate “reporting that is racist or sexist in fact or in connotation” and to “eliminate nationalistic, racist, sexist and other demeaning remarks . . . whether said in seriousness or jest.” The policy applies to the university’s six affiliated news outlets, which are often staffed by faculty and students.

When asked, the journalism school refused to provide any definitions or examples of a “demeaning” remark. But recent incidents suggest that university students and faculty can encounter severe repercussions if they criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, hang flags in support of the police, or challenge gender ideology. The School’s vaguely defined policy allows university faculty and administrators to enforce speech restrictions as they see fit....

If one refers to the horrifically vague Newsroom Diversity Policy, one can see that the school is laser-beam discriminatory when it comes to students seeking work on-air. The university is proudly lispist, hissist and stutterist.

Criteria for air work will include clarity of diction; enunciation and elocution; well-modulated pitch and tone; lack of lisp, hiss, stutter, thickly accented speech or distracting mannerisms; correct inflection; and interpretation of delivery.

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Writer Displeases Boss by Failing to Find Evidence of J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia

Editor: Go gather J.K. Rowling's worst transphobic quotes.

Writer: I cannot find ANY J.K. Rowling transphobic quotes.

Writer is then branded transphobic and barraged with violent imagery and death threats.

Short Video interview here.

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Tara Henley Diagnosis the News Media with Holly Doan

On her recent podcast at "Lean Out," journalist Tara Henley interviewed Holly Doan, who has done traditional meticulous self-critical reporting in Canada for decades.

Holly Doan: It's embarrassing for us.. . . I think the media has not done itself any favors by so much navel gazing, and so much self absorption. Wake up. Pay attention to your readers! I think the journalists have forgotten who their readers are. They don't even know who they're writing for anymore. I'm not going to say. Are they ready for the government? Are they ready for each other? I don't know. But as someone else said recently, it's uncomfortable to watch this suicide because it is industry self-immolation. I think that is media waking up. I don't know. I guess you'll see if there is a difference in the content. That's how you will judge if media is waking up. . . .

I've been asked to give a number of talks on this subject to different groups, some private think tanks recently. And everyone has the same question. What the hell's wrong with media tell us all like what's wrong with media? You know, are they are they lazy? Are they stupid? Are they woke? Or is it all narratives? Is it activist journalism? What happened?

I actually have a perspective that's a little bit different. And that I think that it has to do with the skill set. When I was a young journalist, I started at a very small television station, and part of my job was to twice a week get into the company Pinto, and bumped across snowy roads to cover town council in places you've never heard of, like boys, Vane and Verdun. And from there, you might cover the this was in the city of small City of Brandon, Manitoba, and you've covered the school board and you cover the University Board of Governors meetings, and then you move to Saskatoon and you covers city city council. And then you move to Alberta and you cover the legislature and maybe some courts. And through that decade's long process of learning a craft, you start to understand how government works, how different levels of government relief journalism is not taught in universities. It's something you can't learn in universities. It's an apprenticeship. You have to apprentice to make your mistakes and learn so that by the time you arrive in Ottawa--so 11 years after all of that I arrived in Ottawa, still feeling quite incompetent, and not even ready for what is arguably the biggest story now in the country.

Well, that doesn't happen anymore. Now you have journalists who go to journalism school, where they're not taught anything about covering courts or local council, because it's apprenticeship system, remember? And they go straight to their first jobs on Parliament Hill. Well, how can you know anything about how to cover a farm subsidy program, you might not even know a farmer? How do you cover a business loan program you might even not even know a small business owner. So that's one thing. That's the reporters....

The reporters are no longer telling the desk what the story is because the reporters aren't on the ground and the ones who are on the ground, the few of them that are left, graduated Carlton three years ago. It's a little bit like the analogy I like to use is, you know, when when Mao took over after the revolution in China in 1949, the first thing he did was kill all the tailors because they were a bad class background. And after 25 years, if you looked at images of China on TV, you could tell that no one knew how to make a suit anymore. The tailors were gone. That's a little bit like what's happened to journalism. The skills are gone. Journalism isn't dying. On the ground level, it's dead. Next, you're gonna ask me how do we get it back? I'm not really sure, Tara I'm not really sure. All I know is that you try to focus on Thomas Blackhawks, old timey journalism where we just look at the documents and cover committees and hope that that resonates enough. That Canadians will demand that kind of work. And they are. Tara Henley 5:15 I mean, what you just said it makes the hair on my arms stand up, because I just think it's so important that we have kind of detailed holding of all levels of government to account and that we have an informed citizenry. [More . . . ]

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